I ran the Fritz 8 installer under wine on red-hat fedora core 3, and managed
to install Fritz under Linux. However when I start the program, it cannot
find the talk CD and complains that the disk is possibly a non-original CD.
I can use the program to log on to Chessbase and play games, however I
cannot perform any analysis of the games or get the sound to work.

unfortunately not, it's the same with my Wine-Fritz 8! I wrote an email to
chessbase-support, but it was not possible for them to help me.

I think we have to wait until 75% (or 80%?) of the mankind were using Linux
in 2012 (maybe something earlier): only then we can hopefully wait for a
linux-compatible version of Fritz 14 (for kernel 2.6.584.893)!

Unfortunately too that there was no workaround for this problem (I havn't
found one)!

Stephan Hirsch wrote:
I think we have to wait until 75% (or 80%?) of the mankind were using
Linux in 2012 (maybe something earlier): only then we can hopefully wait
for a linux-compatible version of Fritz 14 (for kernel 2.6.584.893)!

Of course, a chess program is hardly likely to be specific to any one
kernel version.

As a follow up, I managed to get sound to work under Linux by pure
chance. Running sudo wine did the trick, so I think there is a
permissions problem with fritz/wine/sound card access. For the life of
me though I cannot get the analysis to work, everything else does,
including the engine matches. For analysis I'll just stick to crafty.